Sunday, July 21, 2013

In this 5-minute video, Dr. Christos Kolias, Senior Research Scientist at Orange Silicon Valley and one of the founding members of the NFV initiative within ETSI, introduces the basic concepts and objectives of network functions virtualisation. An ETSI meeting is underway this week in Bonn, Germany to further advance the initiative.

NFV, in a nutshell, is about implementing and running network functions and services purely in software, on commoditized servers. The NFV vision is summarized as being able to operate in an environment where most if not of all of telecom boxes have given way to software-based solutions.

Back in fall of 2012, a number of operators got together and decided to form an industry specifications group under the European telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) in order to pursue the development of NFV. The clear objective and mandate of the group is to produce a set of requirements (as laid by the operators) and an overall specifications framework that could lead to further standardization efforts - but the latter is a sought goal of this group. Other goals include the exposure of use cases and the in-lab development of Proofs-of-concepts.